Events

Events

Quest for Success is the annual conference hosted by The Partnership for Excellence, the Baldrige certification organization serving Ohio, Indiana, and West Virginia. At Quest for Success, you can hear presentations from Baldrige recipients, along with insights from other performance excellence professionals.

Employees of COE member companies are entitled to a $25 discount on registration in addition to any general discounts, which can be claimed by entering code “OSU COE” at checkout in the coupon code window.

Most organizations – from multibillion-dollar for-profits to small nonprofits – have a mission, vision, and values that embody why they exist, what matters, and where they’re focused. Sometimes, though, these “big-picture” ideas don’t make their way from top leadership to the front line, a process that’s critical in developing a “people-first” approach. In this session, award-winning Fisher College of Business professor and organizational development expert Marc Ankerman draws on his decades in industry to offer a primer on how employees at all levels of the organization can play a role in bringing these big ideas to life. Attendees will gain new insights they can apply in their own work – and link to the featured afternoon keynote from Safelite CEO Tom Feeney.

How do you create a great customer experience no one wishes they needed in the first place? Columbus-based windshield repair and replacement giant Safelite AutoGlass has built an industry-leading reputation on doing just that, bringing unexpected happiness to drivers who find themselves unexpectedly in need of one of the company’s 6,000 technicians. That front-line excellence, though, comes from a focus on creating a people-first culture inside the organization, a top priority for CEO Tom Feeney (pictured, right), who has led Safelite for the past decade. In his featured keynote for the Center for Operational Excellence, Feeney will offer his insights on how he’s championed the growth of a people-powered, customer-driven organization that fosters a fail-fast culture of innovation and takes on business challenges with speed and agility. This ranges from internal efforts to deploy associate ideas, external efforts to equip front-line workers with new service-minded technology, and Feeney’s own commitment to being a leader others want to follow.

About your speakers

Marc Ankerman has been in HR training and education field for over 29 years. Marc is recently received the Provost Award for Distinguished Teaching for a Lecturer and was inducted into the Academy of teaching at The Ohio State University. Marc is currently a Senior Lecturer at The Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, delivering a variety of professional development courses to MBA students. He designed and created Enhancing Professional Interchange, which is a core course in the Fisher MBA curriculum. He also designed and developed the advanced professional interchange, enhancing written communication and a special PhD communication course, delivered at Fisher. In addition, he is the faculty advisor for a variety of Case Competition Teams at Fisher. Marc is a former Director of Training at Williams-Sonoma, Express, Michigan National Bank and Galileo International. He specializes in the multi-unit, multi-divisional retail world.

Since joining Safelite Group in 1988, Tom Feeney has held several positions within the organization including senior vice president retail operations. In October 1991, Feeney was promoted to senior vice president, client sales and support and again in 2003 as executive vice president and chief client officer with responsibility for Safelite® Solutions. Feeney became president and CEO of Safelite Group on July 1, 2008 and immediately introduced a new vision for Safelite supported by two core principles: “People First, Customer Delight,” which have since evolved to “People Powered, Customer Driven.” As a result, the company has doubled with plans to continue growth through a new “Nationally Powered, Locally Driven” approach.

In addition to leading Safelite Group, Feeney is a director for the Safelite Group Board of Directors and is a member of parent company Belron’s Global Leadership Team.

Feeney has been the keynote speaker at variety of service-related conferences, including the Customer Experience Exchange, Customer Experience Professionals’ Association Annual Conference, International Customer Service Association Annual Conference, Net Promoter Forum, North American Conference on Customer Management, Total Customer Experience Leaders’ Summit, among others.

Before joining Safelite, he was the vice president of franchise operations for Tenneco Automotive Retail. He also served in key staff, sales and operations positions with Hertz Corporation and American International Rent-a-Car.

This event is open exclusively to employees of COE members and invited guests

The Lean Product & Process Development Exchange has long been the most impressive gathering of lean product and process development practitioners. This year’s conference is no different and draws upon the rich examples of innovation taking place in and around Columbus and Ohio State. To bring focus to this year’s theme, LPPDE has assembled an impressive lineup of keynote speakers and case study presentations. Keynote speakers include Billy Taylor, Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company; Michael Walton, Director, Industry Solutions Executive at Microsoft; Michael Kennedy, author of Ready, Set, Dominate: Implement Toyota’s Set-Based Learning for Developing Products and Nobody Can Catch You; and Karyn Ross, author of The Toyota Way to Service Excellence. Click here to download a full brochure on the conference.

Employees of COE member companies are entitled to a 30% discount on admission to the conference. To claim the discount code, contact Jackie McClure at mcclure.92@osu.edu.

Following a 33-year career with Procter & Gamble, Jake now serves as CEO for BlueWorld Supply Chain Consulting, providing support to a cross section of Fortune 500 companies (Cargill, Caterpillar, Dow, 3M, Merck, Monsanto, Newell Brands, Nestle, Pepsico and Sanofi among others), while also engaged in public health sector work with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

At P&G, he led the design and delivery of an E2E (End to End) Planning Transformation creating control towers which now manage P&G’s daily business. He is recognized as the architect for P&G’s demand driven supply chain strategy – referenced as a “Consumer Driven Supply Chain” transformation. Jake began his career with P&G in Finance in Risk Analysis and then moved into Operations. He has experience in building supply network capability globally through leadership assignments in Asia, Latin America and North America.

He currently serves as a Research Associate for MIT; a member of Supply Chain 2020 Industry Advisory Council; Member of Gartner’s Supply Chain Think Tank; Consumer Goods “League of Leaders“; and a recipient of the 2015 - 2018 Supply Chain “Pro’s to Know” Award.